


it gets you right down in your soul

by sodiumflare



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Dissociation, Gen, Implied/Referenced Sexual Assault, all aboard the trauma bus, davinci code snark (briefly), flannel pajamas purchased in bulk, i want to wrap them in blankets and feed them all soup, life is very long, on the bright side booker and quynh are there!, sad kindly people trying to be kind sadly
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-02
Updated: 2020-11-02
Packaged: 2021-03-08 21:00:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,704
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27313009
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sodiumflare/pseuds/sodiumflare
Summary: She makes it a little less than a week before really melting down, and of course it’s over the littlest thing.
Comments: 8
Kudos: 39





	it gets you right down in your soul

**Author's Note:**

> Before the fic, Nile has been raped/assaulted and the fic implies prior rapes/assaults involving the rest of the team. No sexual violence is described. The fic focuses on her and the team muddling through the aftermath. 
> 
> Shoutout to ofinfinitespace for the beta and yelling about this dumb language. Title is from Nick Cave's "Push the Sky Away." See endnotes for more detailed content warnings

It comes and goes in waves. Tidal: a slow and sucking heartbeat that creeps in behind her own. 

\--

After is - well. The boys have a look, a soft and distant sadness that feels nothing so much as fatherly and sets her teeth on edge somewhere in the back of her mind, because what she needs right now is her friends and not some distant dead men. 

Quỳnh is the one to bundle her into the car, to extend a hand into which Nile places her own, to hand her a bottle of water, and to tear open a granola bar wrapper for her. Nile has never seen her so still before and maybe that’s why it works, to have Quỳnh’s cyclonic energy stilled and focused. It’s something that Nile cleaves to that first day, as Quỳnh pulls the seat belt around her and buckles it close, when Nile closes her eyes and does not want to be anywhere at all. 

\--

It’s Andy after that. 

She thought it would be agonizing, and it is, but not because Andy is sometimes more of a force of nature than a person, and a hurricane can wipe out a coast but it doesn’t do it with feelings. Instead, Andy is who she’s always been but softer now, edges not dulled but stowed, and her eyes are knowing in a way that makes Nile want to cry, or vomit, or hug her, so she does all three and can’t even manage the energy to feel be embarrassed. Quỳnh brings them fresh clothes and sheets, strips the bed and throws the laundry out into the hall, and settles them down with them with Diet Cokes and whatever the local cellophane-packaged, salty snack of choice is, wherever they are, and if Nile holds her breath, it almost all feels okay. 

\--

She makes it a little less than a week before _really_ melting down, and of course it’s over the littlest thing. 

(This is not unexpected. She already knew some of what to expect - before, she’s not stupid, and Andy had said more, soft and clinical, later, in their dusky room. But _not unexpected_ and _fine_ are not the same, and isn’t that the whole _fucking_ \- She grinds her teeth.)

It’s breakfast. She’d woken early, and in the process woken Quỳnh, who could fall asleep in the space between one breath and another but woke up if a cat outside sneezed, and the two had ventured downstairs for breakfast in the gray predawn. When they rounded the corner into the kitchen, it was already quietly occupied, and that was the first, small crack in her eggshell: the realization that she hadn’t seen the boys since - since. That they had been hiding from her. 

(That’s not fair, she knows, somewhere in the distance. They are not hiding from her; they are hiding themselves from her, but the part of her brain that she is realizing has not quite stopped screaming yet is too raw to know the difference.)

It’s almost comical, when they see her. Booker jumps like a Loony Tunes character, knife clattering to the table. Joe jolts backward, chair skidding across the floor, eyes wide, and Nicky immediately drops his chin and tucks his shoulders like he does around small children in war zones who are at least one week away from being willing to creep forward and snatch a piece of proffered candy from his open hand. 

That is the second fracture. 

“Oh,” she hears herself drawl, voice rusty with sleep, “so you _are_ still alive,” but by the time the words squeak around her vocal cords and out of her mouth, Booker and Joe are halfway out the door, Nicky on their heels, and she’s interrupting a fucked-up _Dora the Explorer_ -style multilingual avalanche of stammered apologies.

It freezes them, or something. There’s a piece of toast half out of Booker’s mouth, croissant crumbs in Joe’s beard, and maybe a long time from now she’ll be able to look back on this and call it funny. 

There's a plate in her hand that she doesn't remember picking up from the sideboard. It's solid white stoneware, maybe a hundred years old or more - still new, in their eyes. It feels handmade under her fingers, probably local to the area, an art form that died out when an IKEA parked itself 45 minutes away. Nile knows all of this.

The plate is out of her hand suddenly, bright like the moon against that hideous green wallpaper.

Then it shatters into bright, bone-white shards against the table.

It’s very quiet, suddenly, and Nile’s hands are oddly empty, too light. Nile is too empty, too light.

“Nile,” Quỳnh says, from somewhere behind her. 

She can’t speak. 

“Maybe,” Quỳnh says, voice a little louder now, “you all would like to join us for breakfast?” 

The boys crunch through - or around, in Joe’s case - the gleaming white ceramic on the floor and settle down at the table, looking very much like they are in a room with a bomb that might go off. Nile knows exactly what they look like in that situation, and it is the very same faces, although with more toast and jam and coffee with milk. 

“I’m not - I’m _here_ ,” she hears herself saying, and why, _why_ is her voice so ragged? 

“Come and sit,” Joe says, kindly, and she tries to step forward only to realize that she -

She’s moving forward to the table but she’s not steering, she’s in the backseat of her body, she’s watching herself curiously as if from the back row of her high school auditorium, squeaky plastic seats and the ubiquitous smells of oiled wood and stale weed and too many sticky bodies, and four pairs of eyes watching her with something horribly like pity, and she can’t stop herself, floating toward them - 

She maybe hears the tread squeak before she hears Andy’s voice; she’s having a hard time with the order of things right now, but in any case Andy is on the stairs, Andy who can move quieter than a ghost when she wants to, Andy who is as steady as a glacier, and Andy is saying, “Nile, can you come up here and help me with this?” and with that the spell is broken, and she takes herself up the stairs, up to Andy, where there is no task and never was and she can’t even be angry because at least she’s not _there_ anymore - 

\--

She expects nightmares, but she sleeps soundly. Like the dead, maybe. 

\--

“This isn’t the first time this has happened to - to you all,” Nile says, and it comes out like a question even though it isn’t one. 

“No,” Andy says, half a step ahead of her. Quỳnh drifts behind them like a shadow, and Nile knows they’re flanking her but she’s too tired to care. It’s the first time she’s been out of the house, she thinks, since - since, and she’d been all geared up to beg for it, but when she’d intercepted Quỳnh putting on her coat, the woman had just nodded and waited for Nile to get her shoes. When Nile came back, Andy was there, too, chin tucked into a scarf Nile didn’t recognize, but the list of things Nile doesn’t recognize is a long one these days, and sometimes includes herself. 

They’re going to get groceries, probably. She wasn’t really listening but it’s their most consistent errand. Andy and Booker don’t trust those delivery apps for security reasons, while Nicky insists that the produce will be subpar if selected by someone else. Joe takes whatever side seems less enthusiastic to him in the moment, and Quỳnh just laughs at them all. 

Nile doesn’t even know where they are, really. A huddle of households and shops by the sea, somewhere.

“It doesn’t get easier, though,” Quỳnh says, soft. 

“For any of us,” Andy adds. 

“Will they.” Nile pauses. Catches her breath. “Will they look at me again?” 

Someone says, “Oh, Nile." Maybe something else after that. It doesn’t matter, particularly. She doesn’t even know what answer she wants. 

\--

It’s not - it’s not just her and Quỳnh and Andy, she knows, knows it’s all of them. She knows how this works, knows that they’ve all been alive a very long time, knows what the world does to people. 

And yet there is something in their shoulders and their jawlines that bypasses the bone-deep ways in which she loves and trusts them and sends her into that syrupy space under her head. It’s not fair to them. It’s not fair to her, either. Not much fair about any of it. 

So. It’s mostly her and Quỳnh and Andy, these days. 

\--

The nightmares do start, eventually. Of course they do. 

She doesn’t wake up screaming. Nile wakes up perfectly still, every joint locked, an adrenaline drumline beating under her skin and every innocuous outdoor sound echoing in her ears like a badly balanced stereo. It takes long minutes or possibly years to pull herself out of that deathlike stillness, to drag herself up sitting, to wrap her hands tightly around her anklebones and float in the dark. 

At least Andy and Quỳnh aren’t woken by it. By her. That’s something. That’s something, right? 

\--

The bicycle propped up by the back stoop has probably been there before, but it’s the first Nile’s seeing it. “Joe’s,” Quỳnh says from beside her.

The _want_ hits her like a lightning bolt, the first real thing she’s felt since - for a while. The next thing she knows, she’s dragging the bike to the drive and hiking a leg over, when she finds that Quỳnh has stepped to put herself between Nile and the lane. 

Her face says that she doesn’t think this is a great idea. She may be right.

“ _Fuck_ you,” Nile tells Quỳnh, perfectly aware that she's being ridiculous but not caring enough to actually stop. 

Quỳnh cocks a perfect eyebrow, and Nile’s grip tightens on the handlebars - but then Quỳnh comes to some sort of decision, skips out of the way and lets Nile pedal down the lane past her, hips burning, skin flushed. The wind is cold and the sea air burns in her lungs and her legs ache after days (weeks? Has it been weeks?) of disuse, and altogether it tastes like triumph. 

\--

Later, Quỳnh and the boys are watching football in the living room, a joyful screeching cacophony that has very little to do with what’s happening on the field, from what she can hear. 

“You enjoying that page?” Andy asks, tender in the half-darkness of their room. 

Nile blinks. 

“You’ve been staring at it for a few minutes now,” Andy says. “I’m pretty sure that book’s in English.” 

(And it’s _The Da Vinci Code_ , which is humiliating in its own right. At least Andy probably wouldn’t recognize the name, but if anyone mentioned it to Booker, that’d be the afternoon gone.)

“The game,” Nile says. “It’s distracting.” 

“They sound like they’re having a good time,” Andy says. “Want to watch?” 

Nile finds that she does. She lets the book fall closed, accepts Andy’s hand up off the bed, follows her into the hall - 

And then she freezes half down the stairs, heart rabbit-fast in her chest.

It’s not that she can’t do the proximity. It’s that she can’t do the _entrance_ , can’t bear another check mark in whatever _process_ they are handling her with kid gloves through. (It’s not that the gloves aren’t deserved. More dishware has gone the way of that first plate. It’s - she’s working on it.) The story is “Where’s Nile in the Rape Survival Process Today” and Nile does not want to be on any of its stages, does not _want_ to be in this story at all. 

She sits, sudden like her strings were cut. Andy treats it like it was on purpose and sits down next to her, scooches close. They’re both in flannel pajama bottoms that Nile assumes are ordered in bulk, and through the cloth, Andy’s thigh is warm against hers. 

“We can watch from here,” Andy murmurs, and she’s quiet but Joe’s ears prick up anyway, and he looks over at them, away from where Booker and Nicky are shouting cheerfully about something that Nile’s notably improving French translates as a penalty shoot-out in the 1990s. 

The grin feels like a sunbeam, and she can feel herself turning towards its warmth, and only feels a little disgruntled about it. 

“Want a beer?” Joe mouths, and Nile is surprised to find that in fact, she does. She nods. 

He gets them both beers because when the question is “alcohol,” Andy’s answer is always “yes,” and brings them over a bag of chips, too. The label is in Dutch so that clears up the mystery of where they are. She’s not sure you can call it a mystery if it was more of a blindness than a puzzle, but it feels good to solve something, anyway. 

\--

“I think,” she tells Quỳnh, “that I need to go back to work.” 

It’s a chilly spring day, breezy but sunny (finally! Sun!) and their corner of the village fronts onto a lane that makes for a twenty minute walk at a reasonable pace to take in the assorted huddled white houses and vast surrounding countryside. There’s a lot of sky off the North Sea.

“I notice,” Quỳnh says after a careful pause, “that you didn’t say you were ready.” 

“Yeah,” Nile says, and Quỳnh hums in agreement before turning to say, “Nile, may I hug you?”

Nile nods, and Quỳnh wraps around her so hard it pinches Nile’s ribs and spins them around in the lane, Nile’s soles skidding over the gravel, and there’s a sound like seabirds that Nile discovers is both of them, laughing. 

\--

They go and it hits the fan, of course, but in predictable ways and once Booker stops complaining about how his feet never grow back right, it actually ends well. 

\--

Nile jerks awake in the dark, rattles a breath into her lungs. 

It’s fine. She’s fine. It’s becoming more true every day. 

\--

A few months after that, they’re somewhere, doing something, the details aren’t important, when someone catches her eye the wrong way, tilts his jaw the wrong way, and they’re back in the helicopter before Nile recognizes the feeling of having slipped suddenly down a slope inside herself into the deep end of the pool. She digs her nails into her palms, hard enough to bruise if she was the sort of person who bruised anymore, fixes her eyes out the window. 

“Nile,” someone says. She forces her knuckles to relax. The conversation slowly simmers back to life around her.

She did get to throw a grenade at the guy this time, at least. 

\--

“Hey,” Joe says from behind her. 

She’d heard him, of course. She’s gotten better at hearing people, generally, and at hearing _them_ , specifically, and after that time with Booker and the toaster, they go out of their way to make sure she knows they’re coming. 

“Hey,” she says back. 

He steps up to the window next to her. Dutch summer nights are beautiful, it turns out, all ribboned dark sky and jewelike stars over the water. Joe rests his palms next to hers on the sill. He’s regarding the view at first, like her, but then she catches him glancing at the window frame with the face he makes when he’s considering how best to hotwire a car. It’s a good face. He catches her eye, grins. 

“Want to sneak out?” he says, and it turns out that yes, she does, and he unlatches the window. 

The tile is still sun-warm in the cool night air, and she pulls her knees up to her chest, hands stretched behind her, holding herself up. Joe’s got his legs out and crossed at the ankle, bouncing one foot just gently enough that she doesn’t want to kill him over it. Andy has him trained well. The air smells like salt and hay. Like summer. She traces the texture of the tile gently with one fingertip. 

Next to her, Joe exhales. “It’s nice out here,” he says. 

“It is,” she says, and means it. 

**Author's Note:**

> Content notes:  
> \- Rape (not described)  
> \- Sexual assault (not described)  
> \- Dissociation  
> \- Flashbacks (that they happen, not described)  
> \- Other canon-typical violence


End file.
